4 ms·

Wikipedia also has an exhaustive guide, though it's not fun finding tropes you use yourself (I'm very guilty of the false range "from X to Y" thing): https://e

Wikipedia also has an exhaustive guide, though it's not fun finding tropes you use yourself (I'm very guilty of the false range "from X to Y" thing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing Another one that seems impossible for LLMs to avoid: breaking article into a title and a subtitle, separated by a colon. Even if you explicitly tell it not to, it'll do it.

malfist 7mo ago
Thats the thing about AI writing though. Those tropes are things humans do too. But like once or twice in an article. Not every single freaking paragraph
- glenstein 7mo ago
  I also think you can easily get overzealous with it and diagnose increasingly large percentages of ordinary human language as "tropified" due to being part of recognizable cadences. I think most of the things on the list are legit but I think it starts to get to a gray area where it's borrowing ordinary mannerisms of speech that aren't necessarily egregious.
  - lucumo 7mo ago
    Yes, and it's a detection loop without feedback. You can never verify that a piece of work in the wild is actually AI. The poster is the only one who really knows, and they'll always say it's not. This is a problem, because you can easily get stuck in a self-reinforcing loop. You feel strengthened in your convictions that you're good at ferreting out LLM-speak because you've found so much of it. And you find so much of it because you feel confident you're good at it. Nobody ever corrects you when you're wrong. Combine that with general overconfidence and you get threads where every other post with correct grammar gets "called out" as AI generated. It's pretty boring. There's a similar effect with contentious subject. You get reams and reams of posts calling the other side out for being part of a Russian/Israeli/Iranian/Chinese troll network. There's no independent falsification or verification for that, so people just get strengthened in their existing beliefs.
    - grey-area 7mo ago
      At this point it’s pretty easy to detect unaltered LLM output because it is such bad writing. That will change over time with training I would hope. At some point I imagine it will be hard to tell. I honestly don’t know what sites like this will do when that happens and the only way of detecting LLMs is that they are subtly wrong or post too much, we’d be overrun with them. Not sure if we should be hopefully or fearful that they will improve to be undetectable but I suspect they will.
      - lucumo 7mo ago
        > At this point it’s pretty easy to detect unaltered LLM output because it is such bad writing. And yet people seem to still be terrible at that. Someone uses an em-dash and there's always a moron calling it out as AI. > I honestly don’t know what sites like this will do when that happens and the only way of detecting LLMs is that they are subtly wrong or post too much, we’d be overrun with them. My personal take is that it doesn't really matter. Most posts are already knee-jerk reactions with little value. Speaking just to be talking. If LLMs make stupid posts, it'll be basically the same as now: scroll a bit more. And if they chance upon saying something interesting then that's a net gain.
        grey-area 7mo ago
        Never seen this in the wild, but that sounds unfortunate about em-dashses. Personally, I think it will matter deeply if sites like this are overrun by bots. If you believe your description, why are you here?
      - sebastiennight 7mo ago
        I wouldn't say it's "bad writing", but rather that the sheer volume of it allows the attentive reader to quickly identify the tropes and get bored of them. Similar to how you can watch one fantastic western/vampire/zombie/disaster/superhero movie and love it, but once Hollywood has decided that this specific style is what brings in the money, they flood the zone with westerns, or superhero movies or whatever, and then the tropes become obvious and you can't stand watching another one. If (insert your favorite blogger) had secret access to ChatGPT and was the only person in the world with access to it, you would just assume that it's their writing style now, and be ok with it as long as you liked the content.
  - soerxpso 7mo ago
    > borrowing ordinary mannerisms of speech that aren't necessarily egregious That's how a trope starts. When a minority of writers are using a particular pattern, it's personalized style. When a majority of writers in a genre adopt the same personalized style, it's a trope. We find AI tropes especially annoying because there are three frontier LLMs producing a sizable chunk of text we read (maybe even a majority of text, for some people) lately. It would also be annoying if a clique of three humans were producing most of the text we read; we'd start to find their personal styles annoying and overdone. Even before LLMs, that was a thing that happened in some "slop" fiction genres where a particularly active author would churn out dozens of novels per year in one style (often via ghostwriters, but still with a single style and repetitive plot pattern).
- Terretta 7mo ago
  Perhaps the problem is SEO for persuasive writing, LinkedIn-spiration for “business” writing, and school papers for research. The machines read a lot more of this than you would. So for them human writing would appear overwhelmingly troped. Whatever works, right?
  - notahacker 7mo ago
    It also gets RHLFed into it by people who think the "better" sentence is the one with more puffery, and crucially it tries to cram the semantic patterns in whether appropriate or not because it's been trained to write in ways which aren't perceived as bland. Puffery about "rich cultural heritage, a "tapestry" of sights "from the Colosseum to the Pantheon" and how they "serve as potent symbols" probably is better writing than "Rome is a city in the Lazio region of Italy with a population of 4m. It is the capital of Italy". Doesn't work quite so well when its trying to fit the pattern to the two competing diners of Bumfuck, Ohio and how the rich cultural heritage of its municipal library underscores its status as the third largest city in its county.
  - manipathakblog 7mo ago
    [dead]
o_____________o 7mo ago
https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/src/branch/main/prompts/LLM_PROSE_TELLS.md https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/src/branch/main/prompts/LL...
- smusamashah 7mo ago
  The very first heading in this doc was a giveaway even after your de LLM process 'The Em-Dash Pivot: "Not X—but Y"'. This title is so much AI like. I think it's the "The" in title which is putting me off and coming off as assigning unnecessary importance which is mentioned in the wiki.
  - duskwuff 7mo ago
    That's definitely a pattern which I've seen in some LLM output, especially when users let a LLM "run away" with an idea and write a lot of text without supervision. The drive to coin names for things feels almost characteristic of self-help or lifestyle advice writing.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

malfist 7mo ago

Thats the thing about AI writing though. Those tropes are things humans do too. But like once or twice in an article. Not every single freaking paragraph

glenstein 7mo ago
I also think you can easily get overzealous with it and diagnose increasingly large percentages of ordinary human language as "tropified" due to being part of recognizable cadences. I think most of the things on the list are legit but I think it starts to get to a gray area where it's borrowing ordinary mannerisms of speech that aren't necessarily egregious.
- lucumo 7mo ago
  Yes, and it's a detection loop without feedback. You can never verify that a piece of work in the wild is actually AI. The poster is the only one who really knows, and they'll always say it's not. This is a problem, because you can easily get stuck in a self-reinforcing loop. You feel strengthened in your convictions that you're good at ferreting out LLM-speak because you've found so much of it. And you find so much of it because you feel confident you're good at it. Nobody ever corrects you when you're wrong. Combine that with general overconfidence and you get threads where every other post with correct grammar gets "called out" as AI generated. It's pretty boring. There's a similar effect with contentious subject. You get reams and reams of posts calling the other side out for being part of a Russian/Israeli/Iranian/Chinese troll network. There's no independent falsification or verification for that, so people just get strengthened in their existing beliefs.
  - grey-area 7mo ago
    At this point it’s pretty easy to detect unaltered LLM output because it is such bad writing. That will change over time with training I would hope. At some point I imagine it will be hard to tell. I honestly don’t know what sites like this will do when that happens and the only way of detecting LLMs is that they are subtly wrong or post too much, we’d be overrun with them. Not sure if we should be hopefully or fearful that they will improve to be undetectable but I suspect they will.
    - lucumo 7mo ago
      > At this point it’s pretty easy to detect unaltered LLM output because it is such bad writing. And yet people seem to still be terrible at that. Someone uses an em-dash and there's always a moron calling it out as AI. > I honestly don’t know what sites like this will do when that happens and the only way of detecting LLMs is that they are subtly wrong or post too much, we’d be overrun with them. My personal take is that it doesn't really matter. Most posts are already knee-jerk reactions with little value. Speaking just to be talking. If LLMs make stupid posts, it'll be basically the same as now: scroll a bit more. And if they chance upon saying something interesting then that's a net gain.
      - grey-area 7mo ago
        Never seen this in the wild, but that sounds unfortunate about em-dashses. Personally, I think it will matter deeply if sites like this are overrun by bots. If you believe your description, why are you here?
    - sebastiennight 7mo ago
      I wouldn't say it's "bad writing", but rather that the sheer volume of it allows the attentive reader to quickly identify the tropes and get bored of them. Similar to how you can watch one fantastic western/vampire/zombie/disaster/superhero movie and love it, but once Hollywood has decided that this specific style is what brings in the money, they flood the zone with westerns, or superhero movies or whatever, and then the tropes become obvious and you can't stand watching another one. If (insert your favorite blogger) had secret access to ChatGPT and was the only person in the world with access to it, you would just assume that it's their writing style now, and be ok with it as long as you liked the content.
- soerxpso 7mo ago
  > borrowing ordinary mannerisms of speech that aren't necessarily egregious That's how a trope starts. When a minority of writers are using a particular pattern, it's personalized style. When a majority of writers in a genre adopt the same personalized style, it's a trope. We find AI tropes especially annoying because there are three frontier LLMs producing a sizable chunk of text we read (maybe even a majority of text, for some people) lately. It would also be annoying if a clique of three humans were producing most of the text we read; we'd start to find their personal styles annoying and overdone. Even before LLMs, that was a thing that happened in some "slop" fiction genres where a particularly active author would churn out dozens of novels per year in one style (often via ghostwriters, but still with a single style and repetitive plot pattern).
Terretta 7mo ago
Perhaps the problem is SEO for persuasive writing, LinkedIn-spiration for “business” writing, and school papers for research. The machines read a lot more of this than you would. So for them human writing would appear overwhelmingly troped. Whatever works, right?
- notahacker 7mo ago
  It also gets RHLFed into it by people who think the "better" sentence is the one with more puffery, and crucially it tries to cram the semantic patterns in whether appropriate or not because it's been trained to write in ways which aren't perceived as bland. Puffery about "rich cultural heritage, a "tapestry" of sights "from the Colosseum to the Pantheon" and how they "serve as potent symbols" probably is better writing than "Rome is a city in the Lazio region of Italy with a population of 4m. It is the capital of Italy". Doesn't work quite so well when its trying to fit the pattern to the two competing diners of Bumfuck, Ohio and how the rich cultural heritage of its municipal library underscores its status as the third largest city in its county.
- manipathakblog 7mo ago
  [dead]

o_____________o 7mo ago

https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/src/branch/main/prompts/LLM_PROSE_TELLS.md https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/prompts/src/branch/main/prompts/LL...

smusamashah 7mo ago
The very first heading in this doc was a giveaway even after your de LLM process 'The Em-Dash Pivot: "Not X—but Y"'. This title is so much AI like. I think it's the "The" in title which is putting me off and coming off as assigning unnecessary importance which is mentioned in the wiki.
- duskwuff 7mo ago
  That's definitely a pattern which I've seen in some LLM output, especially when users let a LLM "run away" with an idea and write a lot of text without supervision. The drive to coin names for things feels almost characteristic of self-help or lifestyle advice writing.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]